Karen Harriss and the art of making room

Fifty mentors. Fifty mentees. Before any of them could work together, someone had to welcome them. At AI4ALL’s 2025 Women Mentor Program kickoff, Karen Harriss did that job, introducing the organization’s mission to a new cohort. The evening moved on to separate sessions for mentors and mentees, then one-to-one speed mentoring. A hundred people had arrived with experience, questions and ambitions. The program’s task was to help them find one another.

It is a useful place to begin with Harriss. The co-founder and co-CEO of the Netherlands-based nonprofit works in a field usually photographed through screens, stages and expensive lighting. Here, the action was an introduction. The technology mattered. So did the person who might make it less intimidating to ask a question about it.

Harriss’s public career brings several worlds into that room: business, teaching, volunteering and international study. Her professional headline includes sales and marketing consulting, business and leadership, and teaching English as a second language. That combination helps explain why a profile of her belongs as much to the history of people organizing themselves as to the history of AI.

A classroom before a conference

Long before the mentoring welcome, there were students. In 2006 and 2007, Harriss taught Junior Achievement classes through her company, HSBC. It is a small entry in a professional history, but a concrete one: time spent taking knowledge from a workplace into a classroom. The setting changes when the subject becomes AI. The practical question of how to make something understandable survives the move.

Earlier still, she volunteered with Appalachian Outreach. Her account describes a mission trip to repair homes and build additions for families needing safer living conditions, with the volunteering dated to 1995 and 1996. This was work with an unusually plain test of usefulness. A repaired home does not need an engagement metric to explain itself.

Those episodes do not prove a lifelong plan to found an AI organization. They do give her later community work a history. Teaching a class and helping repair a home are different activities, yet each asks a volunteer to make herself useful in someone else’s circumstances. Years later, a mentoring program makes another version of that request.

Her education adds an international strand. Harriss is a Baylor University graduate and has a Webster Leiden Campus connection; her public profile also describes international-relations study and study focused on international nongovernmental organizations. She is based in Leiden. Business and the questions surrounding institutions, borders and cooperation have all found a place in her professional life.

Four people at the beginning

AI4ALL was founded in the Netherlands in 2024. Harriss’s fellow co-founders are Oliviana Bailey, Alla Idrisova and Jana Wilhelmus. The organization’s collective origin story has four expatriate women meeting after hours in empty offices, accompanied by cold pizza and warm wine. Even an argument about the future of technology must occasionally negotiate the temperature of dinner.

The account describes women from different professional backgrounds learning together and worrying about who would help shape AI. Some came from outside the technical center of the field. Their concern was participation: what happens when people affected by a technology have little part in deciding how it develops?

Harriss has extended that invitation to beginners and experienced practitioners alike. The breadth matters. It allows an experienced technologist and a professional just starting to use AI to enter the same community with different questions. Neither needs to borrow the other’s biography to take part.

The leadership structure is broad, too. The team lists Harriss, Bailey, Idrisova and Wilhelmus as co-CEOs, with Wilhelmus also heading strategy. Below them are people responsible for digital work, branding, mentoring, meetups, research and other programs. A shared title alone cannot tell the whole story of how decisions get made. It does make the usual solitary-founder portrait an awkward fit.

The second conversation matters

Return to that mentoring evening. Harriss’s welcome was followed by Anna Brueva’s introduction to the program, separate discussions and short meetings between potential matches. Former mentee Monica Schirripa and mentor Leyla el khamlichi shared experiences with mentees. The event was hosted at Equals. It had enough moving parts to remind anyone who has organized a gathering that connection rarely happens entirely by accident.

The welcome is one moment. The continuing relationship is the larger commitment. AI4ALL’s mentoring offer runs for four months, giving participants time to come back with progress, a revised goal or a more precise question. A first conversation can be pleasant and inconclusive. A later one has the advantage of something having happened in between.

For the fourth wave, scheduled to start on October 28, 2026, mentees choose and contact prospective mentors. The program combines online support with moments in Amsterdam. Its design gives participants responsibility for their own goals and for finding a relationship that fits. There is a modest but consequential difference between being allocated advice and deciding whom to ask.

“AI4All welcomes everyone from beginners to experts”

Karen Harriss

Read alongside Harriss’s earlier classroom work, the mentoring welcome becomes more than an item on an events calendar. It is another setting in which people need an accessible starting point. Here, the organization’s team gives that beginning a structure: an occasion to meet, people to consult and time to develop a useful relationship.

There is another kind of participant to consider: someone with a business idea. The organization Harriss co-founded also supports women founders through its Entrepreneur Program, with separate routes for an idea and for a working minimum viable product. Its workshops and advisory relationships give a different shape to the same broad purpose. A founder needs people who can question a proposition, consider its intended users and help work out whether the business can hold together.

The distinction between those programs is useful. Career mentoring centers on the individual’s development. Startup advice centers on building a business. Putting both within a community allows different ambitions to have different routes. An invitation to everyone would be rather less helpful if everyone received the same instructions on arrival.

That is a practical way to read Harriss’s emphasis on beginners and experts. Welcoming a range of experience creates a responsibility to offer more than a single starting line. Some people need confidence with a tool. Others need feedback on a product or a chance to lead. A community earns its breadth by giving those differences somewhere to go.

A chair at the discussion

On November 6, 2025, AI4ALL’s summit at Equals Amsterdam gave Harriss another public role. She was listed as moderator of “From Data to Design: Why AI Needs Women Everywhere,” a discussion about representation in data, design and adoption. The agenda named participants from AWS, Capgemini, Prosus and Salesforce.

A panel places the work of connection in public view. A moderator has to make a subject available to an audience while giving several people room to speak. In this case, the subject and the format had a useful relationship: a discussion about representation required an actual arrangement of voices, institutions and time.

The agenda also reveals the kind of company Harriss’s work brings her into. Policy, corporate technology and questions of who participates in AI sit beside one another. Her position is at the junction, helping carry a conversation across professional boundaries. The subject fits the invitation she extends elsewhere: people with different experience should have a part in the conversation.

The photograph has a longer calendar

In the gala photograph, Harriss stands beside DataChef CEO Ashkan Roshanayi, smiling in front of an illuminated event backdrop. It is February 2026 in Amsterdam, at AI4ALL’s gala at ING Cedar. The evening brought the organization’s community together around its awards and support for its continuing work.

Her connection to the occasion also had a practical side. AI4ALL named Harriss as a contact for organizations interested in gala sponsorship. The public invitation linked the evening to activities that continue afterward, including mentorships, workshops, research and advocacy. A photograph preserves the occasion. Sponsorship asks what the occasion can help make possible next.

That combination suits the thread running through her profile. A welcome, a panel and a sponsor conversation are different forms of bringing people into a project. Each needs a purpose clear enough to share. Each also depends on the less photogenic business of making arrangements and maintaining relationships after the first agreeable conversation.

There is a temptation in profiles of founders to turn every collective result into evidence of one person’s foresight. Harriss’s story is more interesting with the other people left in it: fellow founders, program leads, volunteers, speakers and participants. Her role becomes easier to understand when the community stays visible around her.

The next person through the door

As of October 2026, AI4ALL’s mentoring calendar points forward to another four-month wave, ending in February 2027. These are plans for the organization she co-leads. They also provide a concrete expression of the aspiration Harriss has voiced: a wider group of people taking part in AI, including those arriving with little experience.

The practical shape of that ambition is quite ordinary. Someone has to find the program. Someone has to decide that their question is worth asking. A mentor has to make time. The pair has to agree what to work on and return to the conversation. The calendar is part of the promise.

Harriss’s route to this work includes classrooms, volunteering, business and international study. At AI4ALL, those strands meet in a community where technical expertise is one contribution among several. The next participant may arrive ready to lead a project or simply hoping to understand the tools appearing in their working day. Either way, a welcome is still a useful place to start.